Haste Multiclassing in D&D Next, Kickback Machine, Sipstarter

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The Kickback Machine

As all of you know, we cover a lot of Kickstarter stuff. Kickstarter might seem like a magic crowd funding bullet that everyone is so eager jump on board with, but what about the ones that fail? If you’re looking to do a kickstarter of your own, or just want to research what might make or not make one, be sure to check out the Kickback Machine.

Multiclassing in D&D Next

Recently Mike Mearls posted a piece about how they are exploring multiclassing in D&D Next, it’s obviously a big deal to a lot of folks – the comments are 46 pages long. Micah and I weigh in (and argue with each other) on the topic, what’s your stance?

Sipstarter Charity Fund Drive (Idea)

We’ve been thinking about our own fundraiser here at Obsidian Portal, but we’re not selling widgets – we want to help provide clean drinking water to those who need it. Micah and I have been throwing around ideas for a while, we’d appreciate yours as well in this endeavor. Tell us what you think!

Tip Corner

Make a TODO list at the bottom of your adventure log post for the night. Keep a running list as you’re playing of things that you want to table but look into later. If you make it public on your wiki, your players will hold you to it too!

Twitter Poll

@JssSandals asks: The DM has an NPC accompanying the party. What are interesting ways for that character to be there without the DM rolling dice against himself all night?

Ahh the trouble with multiclassing. I read Mike’s article and honestly cringed. I really didn’t care for the method of multiclassing in 3/3.5. For that matter didn’t much care for it in 4E. I did however like the hybrid class design in 4E. I feel like something like that might be nice in Next. Honestly though I don’t see multiclassing as a huge priority in Next. I feel like the speciality and background features give you a nice flavor of another “class” in your main class. I’m thinking of a fighter that might take the sage or acolyte speciality.

I really think they are on to something with the backgrounds/specialties too. I’m not sure they can pull off ‘multiclassing’ in the sense people think of it with them but I hope we can find a middle ground where neither 3e or 4e methods of doing it are fully embraced. Time for them to start thinking outside the box no matter how “un D&D” it is.

To sum up, and also clarify what I found out to be misconceptions about what the article said, the model of multiclassing that D&D Next will follow is the 3e model. This doesn’t mean the same system.

A few words later, Mike makes evident that the system won’t be the same by citing two important changes to the system:

A much needed “spreading of the front-loaded features over more levels” (by means of separate class tables for when you take a class from multiclassing).

Some “special rules to adjust the level of spells gained by multiclassed characters”.

This basically negates all the problems of 3e-style multiclassing, so saying that “D&D Next will have 3e-style multiclassing” is so much of a stretch it is plainly wrong: it will just use the same model which we could call the “Take a level in X” model.

Add to this that we will probably still have “multiclassing specialties” as those we already have in the playtest, and I guess we have a perfect system. The only thing left might be some sort of 1st level multiclassing, that by working like 4e hybrids could pretty much be devoid of balancing problems.

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